THE Jews have been historically useful to Western man, providing him with a handy
vehicle for hooliganism, statecraft, and righteous orthodoxy against the race of
Antichrist. Europe's Jews in the early Middle Ages were relatively better off
than in other periods-before and since-and suffered only spasmodic frenzies of
persecution which, being capricious rather than calculated, died out as quickly
as they had begun. Although Jews were shunned by Christians as dabblers in the
black arts and assassins of the Redeemer, they were generally left to their own
devices such as money-lending, an occupation forbidden to Christians as
Scripturally unjustifiable.

Unfortunately for the Jews, however, in the latter half of the eleventh century,
infidel hordes from hither Asia began pressing hard on the flanks of Eastern
Europe.

By 1096 these descendants of Attila, known as Seljuk Turks, had overrun all of
Asia Minor, threatening at any moment to burst into Europe itself. Worst of all,
they had seized the Holy City of Jerusalem, polluting the Purple Blood of the
Lamb with their unclean Mohammedan abominations, as Western holy men liked to put
it. West Europeans responded to the Saracen threat with a series of military
expeditions to the East which ultimately came to be known to Christian posterity
as the Crusades to the Holy Land.

To stimulate enthusiasm for the Crusades, preaching friars, hermits, and other
persons of undoubted sanctity travelled about Europe enumerating the virtues of
exterminating the Infidel and exhorting the Faithful to take up arms against the
Saracen host. The precarious toleration accorded the Jews in Europe quickly
dissolved in the universal excitement created by the prospect of a Holy War. If
it was a pious necessity to destroy infidels in the deserts of Asia, why should
they be permitted to blaspheme the Savior at home? Peter the "Venerable, " abbot
of the great French monastery at Cluny, in urging Louis VII of France to
undertake the second crusade, spoke for a whole generation:

Of what use is it. (he wrote) to go forth to seek
the enemies of Christendom in different lands. if the blasphemous Jews, who are
much worse than the Saracens, are permitted in our very midst to
scorn

2

with impunity at Christ and the sacrament! The Saracen at least believes as we do
that Christ was born of a virgin, and yet he is execrable. since he denies the
incarnation. How much more these Jews who disbelieve everything. and mock at
everything! Yet I do not require you to put to death these accursed beings..
because it is written, "Do not slay them." God does not wish to annihilate them.
but like Cain, "the fratricide, they must be made to suRer fearful torments. and
be preserved for greater ignominy, for an existence more bitter than death. They
are dependent, miserable and terror-stricken, and must remain in that state until
they are converted to the Savior. You ought not to kill them, but to afflict them
in a manner befitting their baseness.

If God had no desire to annihilate the Jews, as the Venerable Peter said, some of
His flock did. The two centuries of the Crusades against the Saracens of Asia
were paralleled by continuing massacres of the Jews of Europe. In the very first
year of the Holy Wars, hordes of self - styled crusaders in Germany began the
work of purification by wiping out the Jewish communities of Treves, Speyer,
Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. In two months some twelve thousand Jews are estimated
to have been killed, while thousands of others saved themselves by accepting
Christian baptism.

Crusaders from all countries soon caught the fever and warmed up for the Saracens
by destroying Jewish communities in the path of their march eastward. The Jews
back home fared no better. A body of crusaders assembled in Aquitania attacked a
number of Jewish

3

communities throughout southern France, offering their inhabitants the
alternatives of Christian baptism or infidel death. When the bulk of the Jews
rejected the Cross, the crusaders trampled them beneath the hoofs of their
horses, a popular method used against the Saracens in the Holy Land. Then they
burned down the Jews' houses and built great bonfires with their sacred books.
During one wild summer, some three thousand Jews perished in southern France, and
five hundred were "converted" to Christianity.

In England the Jews were relatively undisturbed until the Lion - Hearted
crusader, Richard I, ascended the throne in 1189. On the day of Richard's
coronation, the London mob celebrated by looting and burning Jewish homes,
murdering their inhabitants, and sacking the London synagogue. The following
year, while Richard was chasing infidels in Asia, his subjects were rooting them
out at home. Mobs attacked the Jewish communities in several English towns, the
greatest violence taking place at York. There the terrified Jews held out for six
days against a besieging army of rabble, sometime crusaders, and clergy. When all
hope of resistance was gone they slew one another to avoid falling into the hands
of the Faithful.

In the years which followed, public massacres in England increased in fury.
Fifteen hundred Jews were killed during the celebration of Easter Week in London.
In Northampton a rumor that the Jews there had crucified a Christian child
brought bloody retribution when a number of suspects were torn apart by horses
and their remains distributed about the town square.

4

Meanwhile, Parliament was grinding out new
restrictions against the Jews and the Crown was prying money from them for
"reasons of state," which led a contemporary cynic to observe that
the Jews of England were being treated like their ancestors in Egypt, except that
they were required to furnish gold instead of bricks. The end finally came in
1290 when Edward I expelled all Jews from the realm. The edict of expulsion met
with popular approval, and certainly won the admiration of the Italian bankers
who replaced the Jews as money-lenders to the English Crown.

The French seemed to have trouble making up their minds about expelling the Jews
of that country. A royal edict of 1181 banned all Jews from Paris and its
environs. The Hebrew problem still plagued the rest of the .country however. A
few years after the purging of Paris, King Philip Augustus had to burn upwards of
a hundred Jews at the town of Bray because, rumor had it, they had avenged
themselves on a man who murdered a Jew by crowning the culprit with thorns and
then hanging him. The Jews were expelled from all of France in 1306, but the law
was not strictly enforced and was rescinded nine years later. Soon after that,
the French Jews were caught up in one of those spontaneous "crusades" which had
lately been flaring up among the rustics of Western Europe. On this particular
occasion, a band of forty thousand sheepherders, led by a local prophet whose
heavenly visions guaranteed him and his followers sure victory over the Saracens,
decided to get in some practice against their Jewish neighbors before embarking
for the Holy Land. They marched through France, a swarm of avenging angels in
buckskin and pitchfork, burning and

5

killing as they went. At Verdun, where some five hundred Jews took refuge in the
city's fortress, the sheepmen-crusaders stormed the tower and slaughtered all
those who had not wisely committed suicide. Similar massacres followed in
Bordeaux, Gascogne, Toulouse, and other towns in the south of France. Before this
preliminary crusade was over, more than one hundred and twenty Jewish
congregations had been destroyed. Whereas England and France had some semblance
of national organization in the person of the Crown, Germany in the Middle Ages
was a disorganized political hodgepodge of several hundred petty feudal
principalities and independent towns. Consequently the persecutions there lacked
overall direction or sanction, and varied with the moods and circumstances of
local governments. But what the Germans lacked in organization they made up for
in enthusiasm. The domestic battalions of the third crusade, made up mostly of
God -fearing peasants, marched on Jewish communities from the Rhine River all the
way to Vienna. Some years later, during a disorderly interval between the death
of one German emperor and the disputed election of his successor, Jews were slain
by the thousands in Coblenz, Erfurt and Sinzig. In the latter city all the
members of the congregation were burned alive while celebrating the Sabbath in
the synagogue, and public - spirited citizens assumed the title of "Judenbreter"
("Jew-Roaster"), vying with one another over the number of Jews they had ignited
with their own hands.

At Rottingen, in Franconia, the natives were stirred by the appearance in their
midst of a Jew-killer named

6

Rindfleisch. Like others of his breed, he had received an appointment from Heaven
to wipe out the accursed race of Moses. It did not take him long to recruit an
army of crusaders among the good folk of Rottingen, which began its work by
rounding up all the Jews in town and setting fire to them. From Rottingen the
crusaders marched on other towns in need of cleansing, the ranks of their army
growing constantly. Everywhere they went the most exciting slaughter followed.
The Jewish quarter at Willzburg. which had pulled itself together again after
being worked over by earlier crusaders, was this time destroyed for good. At
Nuremberg, where the Jews took refuge in the town fortress, their resistance was
overcome in a series of bloody assaults and they were all butchered on the spot.
Elsewhere in Germany other inspired leaders operating under celestial orders led
armies of holy avengers throughout Bavaria and into Austria. For seven months the
orgy continued. By the time it spent itself, more than one hundred and forty
Jewish congregations, comprising one hundred thousand persons, had been swept
away.

When the Crusades were over and the enthusiasm for killing infidels had been
dissipated by the attractions of a revived trade and commerce, a new disaster
fell upon the Jews. Trading ships from the East, infested by rats, brought with
them the terrible Black Death. Within two years (1348-1349) bubonic plague
carried off one fourth of the people of Western Europe and so dislocated every
phase of life that it even forced the French and English to settle for a
temporary peace in their dreary Hundred Years War.

7

As the number of deaths grew, it became
increasingly obvious that the plague was
a diabolical Jewish plot to wipe out the entire Christian population of the West.
Confessions wrung from a handful of Jewish "conspirators" on the torture racks at
Geneva verified the general conviction: the Black Death had originated with the
Jews of Spain, who had a deep knowledge of the occult arts. In Toledo, the center
of Jewish learning, specialists in black magic were brewing poisons made from
spiders, frogs and lizards, or as some of the more sophisticated versions had it,
from the hearts of Christians combined with the dough of consecrated Communion
wafers. From there the poison was shipped to Jews all over Europe, convoyed by
secret agents bearing instructions for its most effective use. Local Jews,
skulking about in the dead of night, poured the poison into rivers, brooks and
wells from which Christians obtained their water.

The therapy for the Black Death, therefore, was to kill Jews. The results were so
appalling that one's sense of the awful character of the which followed is
blunted by their sheer quantity. A few samples will suffice. In numerous cities
the entire Jewish congregations of men, women and were burned alive. The city
fathers of Basle built a large house on an in the Rhine, herded all local Jews
into it and burned it down to the ground. Four hundred Jews at Worms, and two
thousand at Strassburg, died in flames. The Jewish colonies of Oppenheim
an.d Frankfurt committed mass suicide to escape their enemies. Rioting mobs in
Mainz stoned, pummelled and stamped to death nearly six thousand Jews. In Vienna
all the members of the

8

congregation killed themselves in the synagogue. Before the Black Death had
passed, the same drama had out to the same disgraceful climax all over Europe.
A popular accompaniment to these orgies of persecution was the growth of the
legend of the Jewish Ritual Murder. The modern psychoanalyst, probing into the
dark corners of the mind, might cast some light on the origins of such legends as
this one. Our own lack of sophistication in the subtleties of psychological
investigation, however, restricts us to more commonplace speculations. In the
historical memory of the race, there were in the Middle Ages (and still are
today) certain residual impressions of barbaric rituals from the ancient past.
Such rituals had their "practical" purpose: to placate the gods, to wheedle some
special favor from them, or to fortify oneself against present and future dangers
from a capricious Mother Nature or hostile demons. With the advance of
civilization and the apparent desire for more socially acceptable methods to
achieve the same the ancient practices were discarded in favor of less strenuous
pastimes like knocking on wood and dancing around a maypole. Nonetheless, the
memories of ancient science were still strong in the Middle Ages, and while no
respectable person practiced such things, respectable people attributed them to
their enemies. The Jewish Ritual Murder, which is one illustration of this habit,
is an interesting compound of several elements of savage practices from the dim
past.

Human sacrifice was an almost universal custom in early times. Adult victims,
especially criminals and prisoners of war, were sometimes used, but children

9

were more popular. Young maidens were the special favorites of unfriendly
dragons, while little boys were useful for a wide variety of purposes. In ancient
Greece the kings of Thessaly sacrificed their first son to Zeus. Their Hebrew
counterparts, according to Philo of Byblus, sacrificed their sons in times of
danger to propitiate the avenging demons. The Old Testament relates how King
Mesha of Moab effected the withdrawal of a besieging army of Israelites by
delivering up his son as a burnt offering on the town walls. Abraham was on the
point of sacrificing his only son Isaac when an Angel of the Lord stayed his
upraised knife at the last moment. A legendary king of Sweden sought immortality
by offering his nine sons to Odin in exchange for a little more time, and in
medieval Europe everybody knew that witches improved their own standing with the
Prince of Darkness by the ritual sacrifice of unbaptized children.O

Another element in the Jewish Ritual Murder legend is the use of a substitute
when the original object of interest is unavailable. One of the most common of
all superstitions was that a man could be injured through his footprints. History
is full of examples of vengeful aborigines piercing an enemy's footprints with
spears, while their medieval cousins preferred to hammer nails in them. And
everybody has heard of the modern voodoo festivals in Haiti where native witches
can kill a man by abusing his effigy in doll size. Different problems call for
different solutions: an exciting variation of this theme of magical sympathy
calls for the use of a live human being in place of the god. This was once a
common practice in the Eastern Mediterranean and also

10

in Mexico, where the Aztecs annually sacrificed a young man in the role of the
god Tezcatlipoca.

The human heart has always enjoyed a special cult of its own as the seat and
symbol of life. Before the white men came to domesticate them, the Indians of the
New World used to cut out their victims' hearts and offer them to the sun god to
build up his energy for the long trip across the heavens. A more selfish motive
prompted the ancients to eat the heart of a valiant enemy to acquire his powers
for themselves. This seems almost finicky in comparison with the modern "Leopard
Man" of the Cameroons, who eats the whole body, including the heart and all the
other internal machinery. But this is too gross to interest anyone except the
sensual dullard and the anthropologist. Other examples are more imaginative: Arab
chroniclers of the ninth century tell of a man-tiger named Ibrahim ibn Ahmed,
Prince of Sicily and North Africa, who confounded his enemies by cutting out
their hearts and weaving them into a garland with which to festoon the gates of
Tunis.

Blood also has a special fascination for the practitioner of the occult arts.
Babylonian legend tells of Lilith the "night-monster" who had a special power of
evil over children. In the Rabbinical literature the Jews, she became the first
wife of Adam but left him to become queen of the succubi and suck the blood of
infants. Blood had its practical uses as well as its pleasures. The Gauls of the
early Middle Ages drank the blood of an enemy to inherit his strength. In Peru
the Incas kneaded maize with human blood to make a paste which they rubbed on
their bodies to protect them from disease.

11

Early Christian writings relate how the Faithful rushed into the arena to smear
themselves with a protective coating of the blood of their martyred colleagues.
Cotton Mather spoke of "getting the Blood of the Great Passover sprinkled on our
houses" to stop an epidemic of measles in Boston in 1713, and in 1890 a Galician
magician was convicted of stealing the corpses of two Jewish children and
sprinkling their blood to sterilize a house infected with typhoid.

If we place these residual recollections against the prevailing superstitions of
the Middle Ages, the Jewish Ritual Murder fits perfectly into a popular system of
insane logic. For this was a world in which the invisible was terrifyingly real.-
a world where witches sailed across the sky on broomsticks, warlocks destroyed
innocent babes in the womb, incubi and succubi lay with unsuspecting humans to
propagate the infernal race of demons, and agents of the Devil swarmed around the
dying to snatch their souls to Hell. If we add to all this the hot conviction
that the ,Jew was a Doctor of the Black Arts, the sworn enemy of all Christians
and, indeed, the Antichrist himself, then we have all the necessary ingredients
for concocting the myth of the Jewish Ritual Murder.

The favorite sport of the Jews, as medieval gossip had it, was to torture and
cruellY a Christian boy in celebration of the Passover, which generally coincided
with the Christian Easter. These stories started, naturally enough, with the
launching of the Crusades, although it was almost fifty years before the first
case of a Jewish Ritual Murder was formally recorded in the

12

"history" books for transmission to a credulous On Easter eve in 1144, so the
story goes, the corpse of a young skinner's apprentice named William was
discovered in a wooded area near Norwich, England. A rumor started that he had
been done in by Jews who had crucified him after the synagogue service during
Passover, in mockery the Passion of Christ. The body was brought back to town,
tearfully paraded through the streets and interred with solemn ceremony in the
local cathedral, where it promptly began to work miracles. An outraged mob set
out after Jews of Norwich, who saved themselves by taking refuge in town fortress
until Christian tempers had cooled, although one of the leaders of the Jewish
group was murdered shortly after by one of his debtors seeking a profitable
revenge for the Lord.

Other cases followed in rapid succession: the Jews of Gloucester were of
torturing crucifying a Christian youth named and dropping his mutilated

1. They are still being recorded in our own day.
Waves of Ritual Murder scares swept over Eastern Europe between 1928 and 1934.
The Nazis, of course, pulled out all the stops and 1111934 Julius Streicher's
Der Sturmer devoted a special twelve.page issue to the revival of all the
old Ritual Murder accusations. Here at home the American Jewish Yearbook of 1929
reported the following incident: "On Saturday, September 22nd, 1928. a four year
old girl. the daughter of one of the residents of Massena. in St. Lawrence
County. New York, disappeared. On the following day, after a search for the child
had proved vain, a State trooper interrogated one of the Jewish resIdents of the
village and also the rabbi of the congregation as to whether the custom exists
among the Jews to offer human sacrifice. The rabbi indignantly resented . . . and
later the trooper stated that the Mayor had been consulted on the matter and that
it was he who had suggested that the rabbi be called to police headquarters for
questioning. Toward the close of the following afternoon, the child was found in
the woods about a miIe from her home, where she had been
lost."

13

corpse in the Severn River. Similar reports from Bury St. Edmunds and Bristol
firmed up the popular conviction that the Jews were stepping up their campaign
against the Savior through members of His flock. In all these affairs the corpse
and assorted relics of the victims were enshrined and venerated in the traditions
of the Christian martyr-saint.

In France meanwhile, the first instance of a Jewish Ritual Murder was being
recorded in the town of Blois, where a Christian servant appeared before the town
mayor with a horrifying announcement. He had been watering his master's horse in
the nearby Loire River when this rich Jew, riding a fancy horse, appeared and
threw a mysterious bundle into the river. The mayor, who was obviously more
sophisticated in these matters than the servant, reported to his overlord, Count
Theobald of Chartres, that the Jews of Blois had just crucified a Christian child
in celebration of Passover. Count Theobald immediately had all the Jews in town
thrown into prison pending further investigation. But further investigation by
torture brought nothing to light. The rack could not jog memories of a recent
crucifixion, no mother appeared looking for a lost child, no corpus delicti could
be found, and the Christian servant was unable to identify the man who had thrown
the "body" into the river. So the servant was subjected to the medieval
lie-detecting device of the water test. He was set in the middle of the river in
a boat filled with water. When the boat failed to sink, no doubt remained that he
had been telling the truth and that the Jews were liars as well as murderers.
Count Theobald therefore

14

sentenced the "ringleaders" to burning at the stake. Thirty four men and
seventeen women perished in the flames, and the chronicler of these events
recorded the deed for posterity in the dispassionate tone of the professional
historian:

Theobald. Count of Chartres. caused several Jews of
Blois to be burnt. because they had crucified a Christian child at the
celebration of their Passover and had thrown its body into the
Loire.

The most celebrated of all the Jewish Ritual Murders of the Middle Ages was that
of Little Hugh of Lincoln. In August of 1255 the body of a lad named Hugh, who
had been missing for three weeks, was discovered in an open cesspool near the
home of a singularly unfortunate Jew by the name of Copin. How Little Hugh got
there nobody knew, although a plausible explanation is that like most little boys
he wasn't looking where he was going and he fell in. To the thirteenth century
mind, however, it was obvious that Little Hugh was the victim of a Jewish
crucifixion. His body was reverently extricated from the cesspool and removed to
the cathedral, convoyed by the local church dignitaries and town officials, amid
much chanting and waving of crosses and candles, while the general populace wept.
In the cathedral Little Hugh was laid to rest in a special shrine, with various
relics scattered about him which began effecting stupendous cures among the
ailing Christians of Lincoln.

Retribution followed swiftly. The Jew Copin, near whose home the body was found,
"confessed" under torture

15

that Little Hugh had played. the part of Jesus in a recent Ritual Murder. King
Henry (III) himself, on hearing the new s, hustled over tb Lincoln to look into
the matter personally. In a preliminary demonstration of the royal justice, Copin
was tied to a horse's tail, dragged up and down the city streets and then hanged.
The other Jews implicated in the affair-almost one hundred-were then carried off
to London where some were hanged and the others were left to ponder their
sacrilege in prison. The case of Little Hugh-or "Saint Hugh" as the locals
quickly dubbed him-soon entered into the body of English folklore. Chaucer speaks
of him hI the "Canterbury Tales" and he became a favorite topic of numerous
ballads recited by traveling bards all over the Christian West.

By the thirteenth century so many accusations of Jewish Ritual Murder were being
noised around Europe that Christians were easily persuaded to believe the worst
on the flimsiest evidence. On one occasion, for example, a river ship from
Cologne put into the Rhine town of Boppard. There the passengers saw the body of
a Christian woman who had apparently just died. Somebody suddenly remembered that
a ship loaded with Jews had recently passed that way and it was immediately
agreed that the corpse on the pier had been left by these Jews after a Ritual
Murder at sea. The Christians set sail after the Jewish ship, overtook and
boarded it and hurled its passengers into the Rhine. In Mainz, on the strength of
a whispered rumor that the Jews of that city had bought and crucified a Christian
child a mob set fire to the synagogue and burned to death some two hundred Jews
inside.

16

The same mentality which gave birth to the
Jewish Ritual Murder began early to add some refinements to it.
The Jews were supposed to have a particular fancy for their victim's heart. While
he was still suspended from the Cross, they would cut a hole in his side, reach
in and tear out the heart. Then they would grind it up with specially selected
herbs into a potion of formidable but undefined proportions. The blood was also
drained from the body and turned to a variety of practical uses: to add flavor to
unleavened bread and body to the Seder wine and to cure disease. It was also the
basic ingredient in loathsome witch-brews guaranteed to protect Jews from their
enemies and to turn Christians into mad dogs.

Another favorite among these popular bedtime stories had the Jews wreaking
vengeance on a different Christ-substitute, the consecrated Communion wafer. The
most common version told of Jews stabbing the wafer with sharp knives to make it
spurt blood. Communion wafers , especially consecrated ones, were not items for
public distribution, particularly to the sons of Moses. But Jewish cunning
stopped at nothing. A Jew of Paris was burned alive on the charge of abusing a
wafer which he had fished from the vomit of a sick woman just returned from Mass.
A resourceful Jew of Brussels, who had apparently saved them up for years, was
burned at the stake for mass murder because, it was said, he had stabbed sixteen
such wafers until they dripped blood.

A traffic in international wafer - smuggling was exposed by a Brussels Jewess who
confessed to the illegal transportation of a case of stolen wafers to the Jews of
Cologne for purposes of profanation. Advised of these

17

doings, the authorities at Cologne rounded up the smugglers, who were hiding
in the Jewish quarter, and burned them alive.

The ancient peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean believed that a slain
god-substitute was certain to avenge himself on his murderers whenever the
opportunity offered itself. The medieval man-in-the-street obviously thought so
too. When the corpse of a martyred boy in Germany was tossed into the Rhine it
not only insisted on floating but it radiated a continuous halo of light which
finally led to its discovery and a proper punishment of the murderers. Another
time, a drowned girl ~crucifixion was for boys only) is said to have bled in the
presence of the accused and to have raised her arms the second time they were
brought into her presence. The most edifying example of heavenly revenge,
however, occurred in Posen toward the end of the fourteenth century. A group of
Jews participating in a wafer stabbing found to their dismay that the blood which
spurted in their faces would not wash off. In desperation they sneaked out of
town in the middle of the night and buried the wafer in a field. But the birds of
the air kept circling over the fateful spot and the beasts of the field insisted
on kneeling around it. The secret was thus discovered and the culprits, easily
identified by their blood-stained faces, were bound together with dogs and burned
to death, the terrified dogs tearing at the Jews' flesh as the flames crackled
around them.

By the end of the fourteenth century the Jews in northern Europe had entered upon
their darkest days since the time of Nebuchadnezzar. In the Spanish king-

18

doms south of the Pyrenees medieval Jewry for many years followed a different and
happier course. The howling of the great masses for Jewish blood was yet to be
heard there. When it was, the fate of Spain's Jews would one day be sealed in the
name of her first Grand Inquisitor. Thomas de Torquemada.